Thursday, October 25, 2012

Triumph of the (Electoral) Nerds?

Nate Silver — whom everyone interested in this election should be reading — is bemused by Intrade, which is showing a much higher chance of a Romney victory than his analysis (and he’s actually less bullish on Obama than other quant sites, like Drew Linzer’s Votamatic).

You should probably also know that Nate is, predictably, being accused of deliberately skewing the numbers — no doubt as part of a grand conspiracy also involving the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Area 51.

If you’re new to this, there are two basic approaches to election analysis at this point. One is the campaign reporter style, full of impressionist reporting about who won the news cycle and who has “momentum”, whatever that means (politics ain’t beanbag, but it ain’t billiards either). The other is poll-based. And that mostly means state-level polls at this point: there are more of them, and we have an electoral-college system, not a popular-vote system.

The impressionistic style has been all about Romney on the rise, a narrative that is to a large part being fed by the Romney campaign itself. But the state-level polling doesn’t show it.

In fact, the state polls pretty much say that Obama would win if the election were held right now, taking Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and quite possibly Virginia. Florida is a dead heat, too. (See the Pollster map). Nor is there any sign of movement in Romney’s direction after his big post-first-debate bump.

So why is Intrade trending Romney? One possibility is that Romney supporters are trying to manipulate the results — as Nate points out, other markets and betting forums are much less Romney-friendly. Another is that Intrade traders actually buy the spin cycle.

Whatever is really going on, we’re now getting close to a showdown between styles of political analysis. By inclination, I of course trust the nerds. But we’ll soon see.